


a detour down the beaten path

by Skiewrites



Series: the journey of a beautiful, but almost catastrophic, friendship. [1]
Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:29:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27337948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skiewrites/pseuds/Skiewrites
Summary: Jordie and Kaz don't meet Pekka Rollins, and thus don't loose all of their money. This leaves Kaz in need of an education.And if he so happens to meet Wylan at school? Well, it would only be the start of a beautiful, but almost catastrophic, friendship.
Relationships: Kaz Brekker & Wylan Van Eck
Series: the journey of a beautiful, but almost catastrophic, friendship. [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1996177
Comments: 2
Kudos: 34





	a detour down the beaten path

“Today, we have a new person joining our class. Why don’t you introduce yourself?”

Wylan took a quick glance at the kid standing at the front of the class, looking much more confident than any other kid that Wylan had seen stood there, before looking away again, staring out of the window onto the streets of Ketterdam below. With all the travelling merchants coming in and out of the city, it was not unusual to see new people join their class, and for those same kids to leave again after a couple of months when their family moved on from Ketterdam. There were a couple of kids, like himself, who’s family lived permanently in the city and thus stood back and watched as these kids came and went from their small classroom, but they were few and far between and Wylan was not friends with any one of them, no matter how much his mother had insisted that he tried with them when she had been alive.

He didn’t want to be friends with them though. They laughed and pointed at him when they found out that his grade was dramatically below their own and insisted that he was dumb, which he wasn’t! He knew he wasn’t, because when the teacher asked him a question verbally, he would be able to go into depth into the answer, far beyond what she taught in school, but once it came to the books, or those horrendous quiz’s, he failed every time, the words mockingly dancing around his page and laughing at him when he could only wished they stayed still long enough for him to understand them.

He didn’t want to be friends with kids who made fun of him, and even if he did, he would have less time to practice his flute and his music, even if he struggled to read the pages of those too, and he knew for a fact that his mother would smile more at his music than a silly story of him hanging out with friends if she had still been around to listen to it.

A scraping of a chair against the floor was enough to bring him back to reality, and a quick look to the side showed that the new kid was taking his seat next to Wylan, meaning that he missed his entire introduction. Not that it mattered of course, because the kid wouldn’t be staying long enough to try and put the effort into making friends with him.

The teacher beings the lesson, writing on the board and talking something about contracts, making Wylan quickly lose focus in what she had to say. Even if he could read anything on the board, the subject was dull, as it was one of the only things that his father liked to talk about, since it was a major part of his work, and it was something that he had made sure that Wylan was well educated on, with major emphasis on berating him on not knowing how to read and telling him how awful his future was if he were to one day sign the wrong paper.

His father did like to shove how bad that Wylan’s future was going to be in his face at every moment possible, but before Wylan could ponder about how bad his future would be exactly, there was a poke to his shoulder, causing him to turn around and face the new kid.

“What?” Wylan winced at how he snapped to the kid, but the other kid didn’t seem to react to Wylan’s tone as he stared at him, making Wylan feel slightly unnerved at the actions, like the kid was judging the best way to take all of Wylan’s clothes off of him and run off before he noticed.

“We supposed to be working in pairs and discussing the work on the board.” A quick look at the board showed that, yes, the teacher had set them something to be doing while she mysteriously disappeared from her post, not that Wylan would know what it said. The kid didn’t seem to care about getting on with said work however, continuing to stare at Wylan. They sat in silence as the class around them began to grow in noise with the absence of their teacher.

“What’s your name?” the kid demanded as he leaned his head against his fist in a show of boredom, but it was clear that he was interested in what Wylan had to say, his eyes far to large to be bored and the way that they never moved away from Wylan willingly, and when they did they came back as soon as possible.

The kid wasn’t used to any of this, that much was clear.

“Wylan,” Van Eck was not said, as it was bad enough that Wylan looked identical to his father (except for his eyes, he has his mother’s eyes, bright green and full of life compared to his father’s dull brown), he didn’t want the kid to be able to make any connections between him and his father, least he get the wrong idea about Wylan.

“I’m Kaz,” No last name from him either, meaning that he didn’t want to share his last name or he wasn’t used to sharing it, and Wylan wanted to be it was the latter of the reasons. While the clothing tried to say otherwise, Wylan could see country in the boy sitting across from him, his posture was way too tense and upright to be taught at a young age and there was a slight swing in his words that reminded Wylan of the holidays that he and his mother used to go on, when she had been alive and the world a happy place, and they would run away from the city to the rolling hills of the country.

“How long are you in Ketterdam for?” Wylan asked Kaz who frowned at him, his black hair falling into his face and covering up one of his eyes before he pushed it back again. No boy raised as a merchant son would act like that, only cementing his idea.

“What do you mean?”

“Your father’s a merchant, right? How long is he going to be staying before he moves back home?” Wylan said, despite knowing that his father wasn’t a merchant, but probably a farmer who moved to the city for a couple of months to try and find someone who would take his crops during the harvest season, though this time of year was certainly not a good time to find that sort of investor. He wouldn’t tell Kaz that he knew that his father was a farmer though. He had done it before, and the previous boy had gotten himself in a twist about it. The farmer boys liked to pretend they were from someone important while they were at the school, especially if they know that it wasn’t going to last long and then they would have to go back to their painfully average lives afterwards.

Oh, to have one of those sorts of lives.

“My father’s not a merchant, he was a farmer. But now he’s dead.”

Oh.

“Oh.” Wylan said, before adding on, “My mother’s dead too.” It gained a nod from the other boy, before the pair fell silent. Wylan wanted to kick himself. That’s not what you’re supposed to say to someone who recently lost someone they loved! You’re supposed to say sorry and offer condolences. His father would give him a slap if he was here right now!

“My brother wants to become a merchant though, which is why we moved to the city. He says that there’s lots of money with trading, though I disagree.” Kaz suddenly piped up, catching Wylan from his train of thought. His father wanted to train Wylan to become a merchant too, though Wylan wasn’t sure if he would be happy with doing that, especially with the amount of paperwork that he had seen his father having to do every single say. He couldn’t see himself being happy to sit behind a desk all day and signing papers he couldn’t even read. Maybe he would have to hire someone instead?

“Oh really? How can you get more money than a merchant?” Wylan asked, intrigued in what the boy had to say. His father was one of the richest people in the city, and he only knew this because of how many clients tell Wylan how lucky he was to grow up knowing he was going to inherit it all.

“You steal all the merchant’s money of course!” It was said so plainly that Wylan couldn’t help but laugh, and it made him wonder how mad his father would be if someone, like Kaz, came along and stole all of his money. Of course, that would mean that Wylan wouldn’t have any money, but he could make money doing something else, like playing his flute to people and watching them smile like his mother did.

“But what if you get caught? They’ll take away all the money and then you’ll go to prison, which would make you poorer than you were before,” Wylan pointed out, only to get an eyeroll from Kaz.

“That’s why you don’t get caught.”

And that conversation was the foundation to a beautiful, but almost catastrophic, friendship.


End file.
